Deviance

Deviance

1. Summary

 Deviance is any actions or behaviors that violate social norms, including formally-enacted rules. According to different societies, standards of deviance are different and deviance can be the driving force of the world. Because people can find social tensions and contradictions with deviance actions. Also, deviance can cause personal or social tension and confusion, and pull down public orders.

2. My Opinion

 There is no fixed agreement on the substance of deviance but there are two interrelated properties which help characterize the phenomenon. The first refers to deviance as a pattern of norm violation, and a range of norms are then specified such that religious norms give rise to heretics, legal norms to criminals, health norms to the sick, cultural norms to the eccentric, and so forth. Since norms emerge in most social situations, such a definition is very wide-ranging, and enters every sphere of social life. For instance, there can be class deviance, where the normative expectations of class behavior are violated; or situational deviance, where the norms emerging between a group of friends are transgressed. A second property highlights deviance as a stigma construct, a label bestowed upon certain classes of behavior at certain times, which then become devalued, discredited, and often excluded. This characteristic can also be seen as very wide-ranging: people may make friends deviant simply because they belch or talk too much; whilst terrorists may become political martyrs in the eyes of those who share their particular values. The study of deviance here is concerned primarily with the construction, application, and impact of stigma labels. Within either tradition-norm violation or stigma construct-deviance is a shifting, ambiguous, and volatile concept. Precisely who or what is deviant depends upon a firm understanding of the norms and labelling process in particular social contexts. Despite these inherent difficulties with the therm an enormous sociological literature has been generated by research on deviance.

3. Questions
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